RESOURCES:
Habitat for Humanity Huron Valley (H4H)
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor, and I'm speaking today with Sarah Stanton. She's the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley. Thank you for joining me today, Sarah!
Sarah Stanton: Thank you for having me!
Caroline MacGregor: Home ownership is something that most of us crave. It offers us the ability to be independent, to have our own place, to not feel like our money is just going to someone else if we are renting. Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley partners with potential homeowners to help them build new lives for themselves through affordable home ownership. What is the current need for homes that we are seeing in Washtenaw County?
Sarah Stanton: Well, the demand is really great. I mean, in Washtenaw County, the appraised values of homes have gone up and up, as well as rental costs have gone up. And so, it's very, very difficult to find a place that's affordable to live in Washenaw County. And affordable by definition is paying less than 30% of your gross income on either your rental payment or your homeownership payment, including insurance and taxes. And so, what we have right now is so many people are having to pay exorbitant prices for rent, which ends up being 40 or 50% of their income. And then, they can't afford to save up for a down payment to buy a home. There's so many things about owning a home. As you said, it's an American dream, and so many us want it. Also, there's studies that show it improves education goals levels for kids.It's security, stability, there's so many wonderful things associated with homeownership, as well as wealth transfer to their future generations. And when you can't get into that, when you can't join that homeownership ladder, it's very difficult. And that's what we have in Washtenaw County right now.
Caroline MacGregor: As you said, many people are paying 50% of their income for rent. This doesn't leave an awful lot of money left over for bills, for car payments, repairs, let alone to save toward a down payment, as you mentioned. Who are the people that are eligible for these homes in Washtenaw County? How do you pick them?
Sarah Stanton: Well, technically, it's households with income that are under 80% of area median income, which, generally, I mean, a rule of thumb is it's sort of a household of four making under $80,000 a year. So, it's people that are working full-time jobs, sometimes two people working full-time jobs, but it's still unaffordable for them to buy a home in Washtenaw County and often even rent in Washtenaw County. So, that's who we're targeting are people that generally sometimes are called the working poor--people that are working regular jobs and just can't afford to get ahead and buy a home.
Caroline MacGregor: It doesn't seem to be improving. I know Ann Arbor, of course, struggles with enough housing, and there's two separate issues I believe: affordable housing versus actual housing in general or land to build housing on. Tell me about your homes and the process if you would of getting somebody into a Habitat for Humanity house.
Sarah Stanton: Sure, thanks. It's changed over the years. We currently are building about six houses a year, either building or renovating. So, we look to find properties. We focus primarily in Ypsilanti Township. That's where the greatest need and the most opportunity for us to find buildable properties are. So, we purchase a property, renovate it or we build a new house to move into that house. And they're small homes. They're between 850 and a thousand square feet, typically three bedroom and one bath. And we look for buyers to partner with us to work on sweat equity, to own that home, and we have partners that help us renovate the homes, including corporate groups, faith groups. We use a lot of volunteer labor, which is part of what helps us make it doable, but, of course, hire contractors to do the HVAC and the electrical and the plumbing. But it's as difficult as it's ever been because the costs are rising for construction expenses, everything from labor to project costs, lumber to everything, and then as well, the appraised values in Washtenaw County. On one hand, it's great if you already own. The value of your home is continues to go up. For us, where the appraised values go up really high in Ypsilanti, it makes it more difficult to make that home affordable. And the way we do that is we try to access down payment assistance, and there are some down payment assistance available through different government entities. We have our own down payment assistance. We work with our local banks to get below market interest rates that are available for buyers. There's a whole number of tools that we use in order to try to make that home affordable for the sale to a lower income household.
Caroline MacGregor: And I believe the homes--are all of them energy efficient? Is that what you're striving toward?
Sarah Stanton: Absolutely! They're extremely energy efficient, whether they're renovations or new construction. We are really careful about the amount of insulation we put in. Everything is all new and energy efficient appliances. We build the house, so that it's sustainable for the buyer for the future, so that they can anticipate good electrical bills. And it's more affordable to maintain that house. We keep it kind of simple, but energy efficient and affordable.
Caroline MacGregor: I'm speaking with Sarah Stanton. She's the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley. How do you go about finding a particular parcel of land to build on?
Sarah Stanton: Well, that has changed over time. I mean, I've been with Habitat a long time, and we used to do stick-built houses on single lots that were typically infill lots all around, even in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Now, we're really focused in Ypsilanti because of the cost of lots. We're focused in Ypsi Township where we've been doing community development work for a long time. And we have sort of the ability to work closely with the neighborhood. And so, we identify properties sometimes before they make it to the market. So, that's how we find lots, but it's more and more difficult all the time. During the 2008-2009 housing crisis, when so many things went under foreclosure, we really looked to buy houses that we could renovate and improve and sort of keep them in the affordable marketplace. And so, we did a lot of renovations for a long time. And now, we're back to switching over to more single-family, new construction and infill lots around the county and township.
Caroline MacGregor: I see. And tell me a bit more, if you would, about the process involved in actually identifying a family that you will help build a house for.
Sarah Stanton: Yeah. We're inundated with people that are interested in buying our houses, which is awesome! I mean, because there's really not a lot of supply on the marketplace at our appraised value rate. It's those smaller houses that are under $250,000. You just don't find very many of them for sale at anywhere in Washtenaw County. And when you do, they need a new roof or they're going to need a furnace in a year or they have a leaking foundation or something. Somebody's got to have the cash to deal with that upcoming problem. So, we don't have any trouble finding buyers. We work carefully with buyers though, and they work closely with us to kind of work on their credit to ensure they've got their sort of debt-to-income ratio that's important to be able that we try to really set people up for success. So, it often takes people a while to apply to Habitat and really work through their issues in order to be able to be bank qualified. And then, we work with the bank to help them get qualified. We look for all the down payment assistance we can find and help people kind of back into an affordable mortgage. But really, honestly, there's hundreds of applicants interested in every house we have. We have to kind of carefully work through where it makes sense to sell the house to the person.
Caroline MacGregor: I can imagine the numbers continue to increase in those seeking housing.
Sarah Stanton: Yeah, it's tough. People are, I think, uncertain right now. It's uncertain times about how their job stability is going to be. And with rising costs, the appraised values keep going up. It is frightening to commit to a 30-year mortgage at $240,000. So, it's unsteady times right now, but we're working carefully, and we have the stability of having done this work for a long time. So, that helps. I think people understand that Habitat's not going away. We're working to continue to promote homeownership.
Caroline MacGregor: I was going to ask you a little bit about your construction team. Who are these people? And you also work with.... are they entirely volunteers?
Sarah Stanton: Yeah, thank you! That's so great! We have a team of professional construction leaders. And then, they are paid and work for us, and they're fantastic people! It's a really unique set of people that can do this job because they've got to make sure the house gets built every day and to specifications. And we go through everything that everybody does to get inspections and all those kinds of things. And so, our builders have to be builders, but they also every day, usually Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we'll have a different group each day come out to volunteer on each house. So, maybe it's a group from a local church or a local corporation. And the house leader, which is what we call our construction leaders, have to ensure that they're safe. They have to ensure they have a good time that they learn something, but help us move the house forward in construction terms. So, it's that set of people that work to get the houses built are amazing and have this wide variety of skills. And then, we utilize volunteers really heavily, and we also have some lead volunteers that are real regular for us that come out every weekend and work closely with the volunteers. They're just hugely important! They're volunteers, but they're also just kind of there to smooth the way for the other volunteers, and they're used to what's going on at the site. I mean, one of the things that we have, at our affiliate anyway, is that we've have a core group of staff that have stayed for a long time. We're really fortunate in that we have people that have state and continue to work and work in different areas of the organization. But our community development work is really important because we try to be more than just one house and more than just one repair, but really get involved in the community. People know Habitat. And honestly, when people see that Habitat's bought a lot, they get excited. You know, there's energy around that. We bring out large groups that'll do weekend projects of exterior days, we call them, where we do lots of improvements in the park or next door on people's houses. We have a whole home improvement process that we work with existing homeowners in and around those communities that need a new roof or need a new furnace. We serve a lot of people that way as well. So, it's kind of a full-service promotion of home ownership in the community.
Caroline MacGregor: I've been speaking today with Sarah Stanton. She's the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity Huron Valley. Sarah, thank you for joining me today!
Sarah Stanton: Thank you, Caroline! I appreciate it!
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti.
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